Contact centers may be used by an organization to communicate in an efficient and systematic manner with outside parties. Such centers may for example have large numbers of agents staffing telephones, and interacting with outside parties and with each other. Calls may be placed on hold or into an interactive voice response (IVR) system when first connected to the contact center; subsequently an agent may take a call, place it back on hold, transfer the call, conference in another agent, or take other such actions related to the call. Outside parties may also interact with a contact center by other mechanisms, including initiating contact through on-line chat, video, email, and the like.
In routing incoming calls or other contacts, it may be helpful to know, for example, how many agents in the group of agents with a certain level of expertise in a given topic are available, or to obtain other information about this group of agents, such as how many contacts they participated in during a given day. A contact center monitoring system which maintains and organizes such information should be able to handle large numbers of agents and devices, without significant degradation in performance; viz. such a system should be scalable to larger installations without being limited by a performance bottleneck. In particular, a simple approach suitable for a small system, such as maintaining all of the contact center state information in a database, stored in a back-end database server, and accessed via multiple front-end clients, may be unacceptable because it may suffer from multiple hardware and software bottlenecks at the single server, the load on which may increase rapidly as the contact center increases in size.
Thus, there is a need for a scalable system for maintaining contact center state information, and, in particular, information on the states of agent groups.